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Soprano Sena Jurinac (pronounced Sehn-ya Yoo-ree-nahts) was among that extraordinary ensemble of Mozart singers to have emerged from the Vienna Staatsoper immediately after the end of WW II. Even in the company of Schwarzkopf, Seefried, Höngen, Kunz, Schöffler, and others, the young artist with the glowing voice and assured stage manner proved herself a unique singer, making her mark with definitive interpretations of Cherubino and Octavian, Dorabella and Donna Elvira (the latter second only to Schwarzkopf's magnificent portrayal). She later undertook more dramatic roles, interpreting them expertly, if sometimes sounding out of her depth vocally. Nonetheless, she was one of the world's most treasured artists in the third quarter of the twentieth century and many of her greatest roles are preserved on disc.

The daughter of a Croatian doctor, Jurinac began her musical training early. While in the primary and secondary schools of Zagreb, she pursued music at the Zagreb Musical Academy. After studying with Milka Kostrencic and less than a week before her 21st birthday, she made her operatic debut with the Zagreb Opera in the role of Mimì. Her success led to further leading roles in Le nozze di Figaro and Faust as well as secondary, but critical, roles in Parsifal and Das Rheingold. On the first of May 1945, Jurinac made her debut with the Vienna Staatsoper in one of her signature roles, Cherubino in Figaro. Her full lyric soprano made her valuable for both soprano and mezzo roles and she was assigned numerous parts done equally well by either voice category. Not surprisingly, she was engaged by Salzburg in 1947 and again in 1948 and was well received on both occasions. Her La Scala debut as Cherubino also took place in 1948. The next year brought triumphs at the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino and at the Edinburgh Festival.

In 1949, she also began an affiliation with England's Glyndebourne Festival, endearing herself to the English public and giving them several of her most enchanting Mozart interpretations. Three recordings resulted from her Glyndebourne association, recordings which still merit strong recommendations.

During the early '50s, Jurinac began to gravitate toward roles less equivocal in placement, adding the Countess to her endearing Cherubino, moving from Dorabella to Fiordiligi and later replacing her Octavian with a poised and reflective Marschallin. She moved from Marzelline in Fidelio to Leonore, a considerably greater leap in terms of vocal depth. The former role was captured effectively on disc in 1953 with Furtwängler leading the Vienna Philharmonic, while her Leonore was recorded in the late 1950s under the direction of Hans Knappertsbusch. Likewise, Jurinac moved from Donna Elvira in Don Giovanni to Donna Anna, where her short top register was sorely taxed. Still, the voice remained uniquely beautiful even as recorded under Fricsay.

Jurinac's relationship with America was less than fortunate. Intended by Samuel Barber for the title role in his opera Vanessa, she began study of the music, but did not proceed and was replaced by Eleanor Steber. Although Steber was highly creditable in the assignment, the thought of Jurinac's stillborn performance lingers as a tantalizing might-have-been. In San Francisco, she made her debut as Butterfly in 1959 and returned not often enough, finally giving the audience there her mature, well-conceived Marschallin. Chicago heard Jurinac in only one role, Desdemona in a 1963 production of Otello.

Although she gained recognition very slowly, Giulietta Simionato came to be regarded as the leading Italian mezzo-soprano from the 1950s until the time of her retirement in 1966. Five to seven years younger than her great predecessor, Ebe Stignani (depending on whose information is used for Stignani's birth date) and 12 years older than Fedora Barbieri (who conceived an intense dislike for her), Simionato proved hard to categorize. While she was supreme in the large dramatic mezzo roles of Verdi, she also sparkled in the florid fields of bel canto, employing her spirited personality to breathe life into Rossini's Isabella, Rosina, and Cenerentola. Her coloratura may not have been as precise as that flaunted by such later, lighter-voiced mezzos as Teresa Berganza, Marilyn Horne, Cecilia Bartoli, and Jennifer Larmore, but her sense of fun was unequalled and her trim, petite figure and fluid stage movement made for the perfect embodiment of Italian comic opera.

Simionato made her debut in Montagnana at age 18 as Lola in Cavalleria rusticana. She had studied initially with a local bandmaster in Rovigo, a knowledgeable man who helped her develop her understanding of an already naturally placed instrument. Later, she studied with Guido Palumbo in Padua. In 1933, she entered a voice competition sponsored by the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, juried by an imposing team led by conductor Tullio Serafin, tenors Alessandro Bonci and Amadeo Bassi, and legendary sopranos Rosina Storchio and Salomea Krusceniski. While Simionato won over the 384 other contestants, little happened. In 1936, she was given a contract by La Scala for a wearying succession of small roles, being assigned nothing important until Hänsel in 1942. Even her considerable acclaim for those performances produced nothing further.

Seeing little on the La Scala horizon, Simionato prevailed upon management to allow her enough time off to accept an offer from soprano Marisa Morel who was organizing several opera productions in Switzerland. Notices of Simionato's triumphs there followed her back to Italy and in 1947 she was finally offered Dorabella at La Scala. A Mignon in Genoa shortly thereafter led to her being given the role in Milan -- and she found herself heralded as a star. Almost immediately thereafter, Simionato was engaged for major roles throughout Italy and, subsequently, throughout the world.

When Simionato's easily produced top register led to consideration of the soprano repertory, conductor Antonino Votto encouraged her to concentrate on the mezzo repertory where she could reign unchallenged. Simionato defined her repertory as belonging to four parallel, but distinct categories. First, there were the coloratura roles extending from Rossini and Bellini to Verdi's Preziosilla in La forza del destino. Next, were the heavy dramatic roles, embracing the big Verdi roles and ranging to the Princess Bouillon in Adriana Lecouvreur. Lyric parts, including Mignon, Adalgisa, and her Mozart and Strauss roles formed yet another category. Finally, there were the verismo roles: Carmen, Fedora, and Santuzza among them.

Simionato was not merely versatile; she was superior in all areas. In dramatic roles, she could be commanding or imperious notwithstanding her small stature. From her powerful chest register to her gleaming, thrusting top, she was a singer of enormous magnetism. Chicago in 1960 was witness to the way she defined the Verdi mezzo repertory in her own time. Her Amneris, sensuous in pleading and ferocious in defeat, and her blazing Eboli in Don Carlo roused audiences to volcanic applause.

Simionato retired at 56 still in excellent voice.

Since its inception in 1842, the Wiener Philharmoniker (or Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra in English) has represented the best in the Central European orchestral tradition. Before the Wiener Philharmoniker was founded, there was no permanent, professional orchestra to be found outside the opera halls in the city of Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven. The Wiener Philharmoniker is one of the most traditional orchestras in the world today, with much-beloved traditions, like the annual New Year's concerts of waltzes by the Strauss family.

In 1833, Franz Lachner, conductor at the Hofoper, had formed a musicians' association from the ranks of the opera orchestras to play symphonic music, but this was a temporary endeavor. Nine years later, a group of music critics and other interested parties persuaded Otto Nicolai, principal conductor of the Kärntertortheater, to conduct the first Wiener Philharmoniker concert at the Grosser Redoutensaal (Great Ballroom) on March 28, 1842. The group was founded as the first completely self-governing orchestra, and it has remained so ever since. Although concerts were irregular until 1860, the orchestra quickly built up a reputation. From 1860 to 1875, Otto Dessoff was the permanent conductor, bringing the music of Brahms, Wagner, and Liszt into the concert halls. Hans Richter succeeded Dessoff and conducted the orchestra until 1898, introducing Bruckner and Dvorák to Viennese audiences. Both of these conductors played major roles in establishing the Wiener Philharmoniker as one of the finest orchestras in the world. During this time, the Wiener Philharmoniker had numerous premieres of now-classic works such as Brahms' Second Symphony and Bruckner's Eighth; sometimes, as in the case of Bruckner's Third, the premiere was conducted by the composer himself. The great Gustav Mahler conducted from 1898 to 1901, but his tenure was marked by dissension within the orchestra.

The longest-term conductor of the post-Mahler era was Felix Weingartner, from 1908 to 1927. He was beloved by the orchestra for his measured, classical style and, in particular, for his Beethoven interpretations. From 1933 to 1938, the revered conductors Bruno Walter and Wilhelm Furtwängler shared the subscription concerts; after Hitler's annexation of Austria in 1938, the Nazi Party dissolved the orchestra, but the decision was reversed after Furtwängler intervened. The Wiener Philharmoniker led an uneasy life during the war but afterward reclaimed its place in the world's orchestral pantheon. The list of conductors who have led Wiener Philharmoniker subscription concerts reads like an honor roll of maestros; Richard Strauss, Arturo Toscanini, Herbert von Karajan, and Leonard Bernstein have each taken turns at the podium.

The Wiener Philharmoniker has held an annual New Year's Day Concert of Strauss family works, particularly those of Johann II, since 1941 when Clemens Krauss began the tradition; the first of these concerts was actually held on New Year's Eve in 1939, after which the concert has occurred on New Year's Day. Riccardo Muti led the orchestra in its 80th New Year's concert in 2021, marking his sixth appearance in the series. While some of its traditions are revered, others have come under fire in recent years. Though the Wiener Philharmoniker premiered a lot of music in its early days, it now prefers to play mostly music written before 1900, which created a controversy at the Salzburg Festival during the 1990s. The orchestra also refused until 1997 to accept a female musician as a full member, threatening to disband rather than cave in to political pressure. The first woman member of the Wiener Philharmoniker was harpist Anna Lelkes, who was granted full membership after 26 years of service. Simone Young was the first woman to conduct the Wiener Philharmoniker in 2005, and in 2008, Albena Danailova became the orchestra's first female concertmaster. Historically, the Wiener Philharmoniker has opposed hiring musicians who are not Central European in order to preserve what is perceived as a unique quality of sound. While the orchestra's policies may be controversial, it cannot be disputed that the Wiener Philharmoniker is one of the world's finest orchestras, performing with exceptional finesse and clarity, with a beautifully blended woodwind and brass sound that meshes perfectly with its subtle, lush strings.

The Wiener Philharmoniker is celebrated on 24-carat gold bullion coins issued by the Austrian Mint. In 2006, the design of the coinage was featured by Austrian Airlines on its airplanes to promote both the orchestra and the sale of the coins, which are among the most popular with investors. ~ Andrew Lindemann Malone

Herbert von Karajan was the most renowned conductor to emerge from Europe in the post-World War II era -- and through fortuitous timing throughout his career, and in spite of controversy that dogged his early years, he was the most recorded conductor of the 20th century, and is likely to remain one of the most visible (and biggest-selling) conductors well into the 21st century. Born in Salzburg and descended from a family of Greek origin with deep roots in Austria -- including scholars and physicians in Vienna and Salzburg -- he was a music prodigy, playing the piano at three and playing his first recital a year later. He received encouragement in his teens to shift his focus from the piano to the podium, and the experience of hearing Toscanini conduct on a visit to Vienna possessed him to follow that path. Toscanini and -- a great irony -- Wilhelm Furtwangler became his two idols among conductors; Karajan's teachers included the renowned Viennese conductor (and one time Bruckner student) Franz Schalk. He got his first musical post in 1928 -- at age 20 -- at the Ulm City Theater, initially as chorusmaster and later as conductor, and over the next seven years he learned how to lead an orchestra from the ground up, serving as coach and every other capacity common to a small but busy musical berth.

With the rise of the Nazi Party in Germany (which Karajan joined in 1933) and the positions that opened up with the purging of Jewish and part-Jewish musicians from all posts, Karajan saw an opportunity to advance rapidly on a bigger stage than any available in Austria -- he moved his career to Germany in 1935, and became the youngest man in the country to hold a music director's position when he was appointed to the job at Aachen. He was not overtly political, however, and gladly accepted an invitation from Bruno Walter -- perhaps the most prominent Jewish conductor to have been forced out of Germany -- to conduct Wagner's Tristan und Isolde at the Vienna State Opera. From 1938 through 1942, he conducted the Berlin State Opera, and that same year he made his debut with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. In 1941, he accepted the appointment as music director of the Berlin State Opera.

Karajan found himself in an awkward but prominent position in Germany during the Nazi era. His approach to conducting -- his demanding rehearsals and his precision, even in dealing with such august bodies as the string section of the Berlin Philharmonic -- and his intense personality, coupled with bracing, exciting musical results, earned him the admiration of Adolf Hitler. Additionally, his avoidance of any public displays of resistance to Nazi ideology made him a favorite of the Nazi cultural officials as a counterweight to Wilhelm Furtwangler, the most renowned conductor in the German-speaking world but also a fiercely independent voice, who was known to regard the Nazi Party officials around him with disdain and dismissiveness. It soon became clear that the government was intent on playing Karajan off against Furtwangler, using the younger conductor to subtly pressure the older man and prick his understandably outsized ego. And Karajan gained the quietly repeated nickname of "Hitler's favorite." How much he did to encourage or engender this "fandom" -- beyond pursuing excellence at the podium -- is questionable, and it should be pointed out that septuagenarian composer Franz Lehár enjoyed similar admiration from the Nazi dictator, despite his being apolitical and also having a Jewish wife. Ironically, Karajan found himself in a somewhat similar situation when he married a woman of Jewish descent, Anita Guetermann, in 1942; after that, he was out of favor with the party as well.

Karajan made his recording debut in 1938, at age 30, and those early recordings, including his first Beethoven symphony (No. 7) and some Wagner preludes, as well as symphonies by Mozart, Tchaikovsky, and Dvorák, are of significant academic interest, as are his wartime recordings. But Karajan's major career on record didn't really begin until after World War II in Vienna, when he met producer Walter Legge. Although Karajan wasn't able to conduct in public because of his activities in Germany during the war -- he was "denazified" officially until 1947 -- Legge, as representative of a privately owned business (EMI Records), was able to arrange sessions with the Vienna Philharmonic. Those recordings, done during a time when musicians in occupied Vienna needed to work just to raise their food rations to a subsistence level -- which included the Beethoven Eighth and Ninth symphonies, among other works -- had a quality and an urgency that were bracing to listeners at the time, and they were still being reissued, in audiophile remastered editions, four decades later, in 2005 and 2006.

Karajan's career ascent was stymied in the decade after the end of the war by his rivalry with Furtwangler, who would not let him near either the Berlin or the Vienna Philharmonic orchestras. Instead, he took the leadership of the Vienna Symphony, and also became the principal conductor of the Philharmonia Orchestra. It was with the Philharmonia, for EMI, that Karajan's recorded legacy grew astronomically in the late '40s and the first half of the '50s. Karajan's denazification and his appointment to the Philharmonia coincided with the advent of magnetic tape recording in England (though EMI was slow to adopt the new system) and the LP record; he was also more open to the concept of recording than Furtwangler or any of his older conducting rivals, who tended to regard making records as an unpleasant adjunct to a music career. Where Furtwangler, Erich Kleiber, Hans Knappertsbusch, etc., kept their recording activities to a minimum, Karajan reveled in the act of recording -- he made dozens of records across those seven years, of repertoire ranging from Bach to Vaughan Williams, including operatic works, from Mozart to Johann Strauss and Richard Strauss that have never been equaled, not even by his own subsequent efforts. He also cut his first complete Beethoven symphonic cycle, which straddled the mono and stereo eras -- the First through Seventh and the Ninth were in mono, but the Eighth was in stereo. The Beethoven cycle was also an illustration of Karajan's mindset -- Karajan had never performed the Fourth Symphony in concert, and it would never have occurred to Furtwangler, Kleiber, et al., to record a work that they'd never had in their concert repertoire, but Karajan simply did the Fourth for the first time for the cycle. That series of recordings was also notable for the vision of Beethoven's symphonies that they presented, resplendent in a lush string tone, bursting tension, and energy that oozed out of every bowing and note. Virtually all of his recordings from the 1950s, whether in mono or stereo, retain exceptional luster and richness, owing to Walter Legge's production and the work of the EMI engineering staff, and continue to sell well in the 21st century.

From the second half of the 1950s onward much of Karajan's activity -- apart from occasional forays to RCA Victor and Decca/London, and a short return to EMI at the outset of the 1970s -- was centered on the Deutsche Grammophon label, where the lion's share of his Berlin Philharmonic recordings would be made and released. From the advent of the stereo era onward, as his recordings gained him an ever-widening audience around the world, he would become among the busiest conductors in the studio in the entire world, and also one of the first to avail himself fully of the newest developments in air travel, jetting around the world to meet commitments and also learning to fly himself. Karajan in the late '50s and 1960s seemed as "new world" in his habits as the men he succeeded had seemed "old world." He re-recorded all of his key repertoire, from Beethoven to Schubert, more than once throughout the 1960s and 1970s, including a new cycle of the former's nine symphonies in each of the those decades and once more in the 1980s, and he extended himself more deeply into the classical era, with the symphonies of Haydn, and into the Baroque period with Bach and Handel (and even such crowd-pleasing pieces as the Albinoni Adagio and the Pachelbel Canon in D), and to the post-Romantic and modern eras with the orchestral works of Berg and Webern -- he was superb at the latter two, less so with Haydn, Bach, Handel, et al. It was almost a necessity to find these other areas, however, as Karajan's recording commitments multiplied; by the end of the 1970s, he had passed Leopold Stokowski -- the earliest major conductor to embrace the phonograph record, and practically a one-man recording industry -- as the most recorded conductor in history. Among his few "blind spots" among major Romantic composers was Gustav Mahler, whose music didn't become part of his repertoire until very late in his career -- although when he did embrace Mahler, the results were most impressive.

Karajan's career timing was fortuitous in other areas as well. With the advent of the home video era, there were two major bodies of his video performances waiting to fill that demand. Karajan's appearances on television dated back to the end of the 1950s, and his broadcasts from 1965 into the mid-'70s were distributed by Unitel, which later made them available on videocassette, laserdisc, and DVD. From the end of the 1970s, however, all of Karajan's video work was done through his own production company, Telemondial, which later licensed them to Sony for release commercially. Ironically, many of these were among his least-favored and controversial works critically -- too many of the Telemondial performances were more like music videos, with hours spent getting the sections of the orchestra looking right, from the correct angle, and synchronizing that shot up with a recording that was already made. With a few notable exceptions, such as the actual live performances in front of an audience at the Vienna New Year's concerts, most viewers dismiss these "documents" as artificial and totally the opposite of what a concert is supposed to be; they were about visual perfection rather than performance, and that seemed to characterize many of his late-career efforts in music. Additionally, during the final 15 years of his life, Karajan engendered some resentment from critics and fellow musicians for his rapidly escalating fees, which led the way to similar demands from other artists and helped to turn the economics of classical concerts into something resembling major-league baseball.

Karajan also played a key role in the development of the compact disc format, lending his work and his prestige to its rollout in 1981 -- it was also reportedly at his insistence that the original intended running time of the CD, 60 minutes, was pushed to 68 minutes, using the running time of a typical Beethoven Symphony No. 9 as a benchmark. At the time of his death in 1989, he had completed yet another Beethoven cycle and was beginning to redo many key works in the digital format; his last recording was of the Bruckner Seventh Symphony with the Vienna Philharmonic. Oddly enough, for all of his renown, he was not the most honored conductor of his time, at least in the United States -- Sir Georg Solti earned more Grammy Awards -- but he was, along with American Leonard Bernstein, one of the two most well-known conductors in the world. And even the timing of his death was perfect, in that there was no slowing of the number of releases of his work -- CD conversions of work from the 1940s, 1950s (especially legitimate versions of live opera recordings, and in particular those with Maria Callas), and 1960s have filled release lists and still fill the racks of music stores more than two decades later; both EMI and Deutsche Grammophon have their "Karajan Editions" in various forms. ~ Bruce Eder